Kong Skull Island review: Tom Hiddleston the main man in monster mash

The last 12 months have been busy for Tom Hiddleston, from the highs of The Night Manager to his dalliance with Taylor Swift.

Now comes Kong: Skull Island, the leading blockbuster role that should establish him as a man of action. It's just a shame, however, that it doesn't give him much to do except stalk through the jungle with a furrowed brow, wondering what the universe has against decent, talented English chaps just trying to muddle along in Hollywood.

You can guess much of the story from its title, but less obviously it’s set in the dying days of the Vietnam War. Bill Randa (John Goodman) is head of Monarch, an obscure US government department, and he lobbies successfully for a helicopter force, led by Samuel L. Jackson’s war-addicted Lt. Col. Packard, to be diverted to explore a previously unknown island discovered by brand-new satellite imagery.

Tagging along are Hiddleston’s ex-SAS mercenary and jungle expert James Conrad (the allusion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and thence to Apocalypse Now is the first of many) and war photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson). But whadya know, the expedition runs into trouble in the shape of a gigantic ape.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts is new to blockbuster filmmaking; he stepped up to this following his 2013 indie hit The Kings Of Summer. Surprisingly, it’s not the visuals that he fluffs but the character work and storytelling. Vogt-Roberts builds the film around big, showstopping images: Kong towering above a jungle fire; characters confronted by an enormous water buffalo, festooned in water weeds like a surreal god in a Studio Ghibli film; endless, glorious shots of real jungles from Hawaii to Vietnam.

But, fatally, the director never spends time on any of the characters who fill the screen – and while no sensible person goes to a monster movie for deep human drama, you need at least a sprinkling to make it work. This needs, say, ten fewer soldiers and two meaty scenes each for ostensible leads Hiddleston and Larson (who, lest we forget, won an Oscar in the middle of this shoot for Room), to make the film worthy of their time. And the story – which should be a simple, propulsive, escape-the-island chase – gets muddied and lost when characters double back without much difficulty and any sense of the island’s geography disappears.

John C. Reilly tries valiantly to add some comic relief as the castaway marooned on the island 28 years before, but he sometimes seems to be in a different film to everyone else – as does Samuel L. Jackson’s increasingly unhinged commanding officer. Still, they’re about the only ones given close to enough screentime, with one particularly talented actor stuck with reprising the role of Dead-Meat Thompson from Hot Shots! – no, do tell us more about your adorable family back home, you poor doomed fool.

Kong also takes some getting used to. He’s so much bigger than ever before - at 100ft more than double his previous size - that there’s less sense of connection to the human characters. His upstanding humanoid design, a deliberate throwback to the 1933 original film, is far removed from Peter Jackson’s gorilla-like 2005 incarnation and looks artificial and ill-at-ease in the natural world he is supposed to be protecting. The monsters he fights are stunningly ugly though, so at least he beats someone in the beauty stakes.

You may want to stay through the credits to see where they’re going with this, which is basically towards a 2020 clash with Godzilla. Yes, the 300ft, fire-breathing one we saw in 2014 – plus, potentially, other classic monsters like Mothra, King Ghidorah and Rhodan. It seems unlikely that the same human cast will return, given the 40 year gap, but on this evidence they won’t miss aping around like this.